Ecommerce Design

We create shopping experiences your customers will love.

What makes ecommerce work?

Your ecommerce website is a visual representation of your brand—an opportunity to gain your customer’s trust, drive sales, and grow your business online. Well-designed ecommerce websites attract loyal customers that return again and again. Creating the best shopping experience and building customer’s trust requires an intuitive UX (user experience) design. We keep visuals simple and let your products do the talking.

What’s our design and development philosophy? Human.

When designing your ecommerce site, we start with the question: how do your customers want to shop for your products? It means taking off our designer and developer hats and looking at it through the lens of your real customers. After launch, we have the tools to show exactly how customers are interacting with your online store.

When you watch your customers actually trying to find and learn about your products, you quickly learn what delights or bugs the heck out of them. With this basic human testing achieved, we then take things to the next level: Knowing your customers (which we will), we then design the shopping experience based on what they need to see or know. This is how we craft the kind of sites customers appreciate when shopping online.

Our ecommerce design process:

We host a series of discovery, user story mapping and wireframing sessions to define your needs as well as the needs of your customers. The easier it is for your customers to use your website, the more likely they’ll make a purchase.

Discovering your needs and who your customers are

Our strategy starts with a deep understanding of your business. During the discovery process, you’ll meet your project team that will include a designer, a developer, and a marketing strategist. To learn about your goals, we’ll ask you about your brand, the types of products you sell, who your target audience is, and what sets you apart from your competition.

Mapping out your customer’s journey

Once we’ve gotten to know you brand, we’ll get in the minds of your customers through user story mapping. A few of the important questions we’ll consider at this stage are:

• How are customers arriving at your website? Google shopping ads? Google search? Radio ads?
• What are customers looking for most often when they reach your website? Sale items? New product lines?
• When a customer is viewing your product, what influences them to add it to their cart? A sizing chart to ensure they’re selecting the right size? Free shipping? Ability to view the item in a different color?

These questions provide focus and clarity to the goals your website needs to achieve, whether you’re trying to increase sales, encourage and deepen customer loyalty, drive more traffic to your site or blog, or increase newsletter signups.

Defining user stories like the example above helps us make educated decisions about what to include in your layouts. They also help us determine which features are highest priority and which features are nice to have if there’s room in your budget.

Take your new layouts for a test drive before fully investing in them

We take what we’ve learned in the discovery and user story mapping processes to design the wireframes (like blueprints) for your online store. We put a great deal of thought and detail into these so you can get a clear snapshot of how your site’s going to work before any visual styles are applied.

We use prototyping software to link the wireframes together and walk you through the new layouts. We’ll test drive the layouts on virtual desktop and mobile devices to identify what’s working well and what needs to be made easier/more intuitive. Identifying problem areas early on is more agile and cost-effective than fixing them in the development phase.

Establishing the right visual tone for your brand

Once we’ve finalized the page layouts, we’ll design a style guide for your brand. A style guide includes your logo, colors, fonts and typography styles. This sets the visual tone for your website to assure consistent expression of your brand, and also helps save time in the development phase.

If you’re satisfied with your current visual branding and just need a better ecommerce site and functionality, we’ll develop the site using your existing brand standards.

Mobile-first responsive web design for ecommerce

Whether people are looking for nearby stores, checking if a product is in stock at a specific location, looking at product reviews, or just browsing the latest products, mobile is changing shoppers’ behaviors and motivations.

Mobile-first responsive web design for ecommerce allows customers to access your website any time, on any device. The mobile-first approach forces the design to be clean and simple, and excludes features that don’t impact your bottom line. The design of your mobile ecommerce website should include an intuitive navigation and product filtering system, inviting, high quality product photography, large tap targets for buttons and links, large, easy to read text, and an easy checkout experience on any screen size.

New design, or update of an existing one?

Should you refresh the design of your current ecommerce site or build a new one from scratch? There are several factors that play into this. For example, the age and scope of your site. Are your products currently presented in their best light? Is your current site copy-heavy, and lacking supportive imagery and colors? (Most are.)

Making iterative improvements to optimize an existing store design

Our iterative, agile approach to ecommerce design allows us to make high-impact, low-investment updates to your current website to optimize conversions as well. Tweaks to the user flow, navigation, layouts, content, colors, typography, and icons can make a huge impact on sales. We typically find a plethora of untapped design opportunities that can improve performance drastically.

Customizing a template to get your store up and running faster

If you’re looking for a new ecommerce website with a lower entry cost, starting with a pre-designed premium template can be a great option. We can apply your brand styles these templates to add a personal look and feel for your store — with minimal investment in custom theme development.

Starting from scratch with a new, custom ecommerce design

Sometimes pre-designed templates just can’t handle the customizations you may need for your products, or to sell the full value to justify your pricing. If you’re creating or updating an existing website, and need to really tailor your customer experience, or create unique product requirements or customer workflows, your site is probably ready for a new, custom design.

iBec can help you determine which of these three options is best for you. Our goal is to help you most wisely spend your budget, to create the maximum sales potential. Schedule a meeting with us for a free consultation.